I am now convinced that Sgt. Crowley is a good cop (I never doubted it)and that Gates is a good professor. They both may have overreacted, understandably, to stress and things got heated and out of hand.

It happens to the best of us. My question is: What about Obama? Why did the president charge into a controversy without knowing the facts and call the police stupid? Obama is the one we elected, and he should keep his snap judgments to himself and take the time to learn the facts before he speaks.

I also dislike the fact that he called doctors crooks by implying, in the same press conference, that they would take out healthy tonsils just to make extra money.

In 1993-94, when the Clintons tried to pass healthcare reform, the opposition to their proposals was concentrated among middle-aged voters, galvanized by the “Harry and Louise” ads. But opposition to the Obama proposals centers among the elderly, who suspect that it will mean a sharp curtailment of their medical care.

Buried amid its astonishing annual growth rate, even in the recession, is the sad story of China’s socialist sector, a huge and perennial drag on its economy. The failure of government control amid the success of private initiative is a story that President Obama would do well to study as he brings government control and management to the automobile and banking industries in the United States.

President Obama’s rhetoric last night summoned the memory of “1984,” George Orwell’s novel of a nightmarish future — where the slogan of the rulers is “War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength.”

The president assures us that he will cut health-care spending . . . by adding $1 trillion to health-care spending.

He says that “health-care decisions will not be made by government” . . . while he sets up a new Federal Health Board to tell doctors what treatments they can offer and to whom and under what circumstances.

Superficially, the United States appears to have a presidential system, but in fact it more and more resembles a parliamentary form of government. When a president loses the approval of the majority of the voters and polls reflect that his ratings have fallen substantially below 50 percent, he loses his power. In this context, polls are like parliamentary votes of no confidence in European systems. While the government does not fall if it loses in the polling, it limps on until either its ratings improve or it is voted out of office at the next election.

If the Democrats obey President Obama’s command and pass a health-care bill by the August recess, they’ll be committing partisan suicide.

Obama’s insistence that we completely remake our health-care system — and do it two weeks after the first bill was marked up in the first committee — is too arrogant by half. It smacks of the kind of overreaching of FDR’s second term in 1937, when, after his landslide win in 1936, he tried to pack the Supreme Court to reverse its anti-New Deal rulings.

In two weeks, Obama’s health care plan is likely to become law, ending medicine as we know it in the United States! Unless we can stop him, our own personal access to medical care will be attenuated (no matter if we can pay for it ourselves) and we will all be subject to bureaucratic rationing.

Seeing his popularity draining away rapidly, President Obama has cynically decided to ram through the complex health care legislation in two weeks, without debate or amendment. He is going to give up the attempt to win sixty votes in the Senate and will use the budget reconciliation procedure – which is only used for budget bills – to push it through with fifty votes.

Now President Obama says in The Washington Post that he never envisioned that his stimulus package would afford quick relief to the American economy, but would do so only after it had run its two-year course. But when it was passed, Obama sang a different tune, urgently demanding its enactment to speed relief to a sagging economy. He claimed it would “create or save” 600,000 jobs. Now, even as the economy loses 450,000 jobs each month, he pretends that it is a matter of time until the stimulus kicks in.

In the polling hierarchy, the least signif icant data measure is a president’s per sonal popularity. Here, President Obama excels, with most polls showing him in the high 60s. Next comes his job approval, significant but not necessarily predictive.

Obama’s approval, in the Rasmussen Poll, has now dipped to 51 percent, one point less than his 2008 vote share of 52 percent. In past polls, most voters registering disapproval for the president had voted for Sen. John McCain. Now, Obama’s starting to lose people who backed him last November.

President Obama has crossed the red line in his dropping approval rating.

The percentage of Americans who strongly or somewhat approve of how he is doing his job has fallen to 51 percent in the latest Rasmussen polling — the lowest ever. Because Obama got 52 percent of the vote in the presidential race, defeating McCain by 52-47, the fact that his approval has dropped below his vote share indicates that he is actually shedding real support for the first time.